Raymond C. Andrews

Medical Grail Raymond C. Andrews

"I've fallen down and can't get up!" Congratulations. You are now about to enter the Twilight Zone. It is a place of mind and matter, of test and retest, of drugs you cannot name, and of unnecessary, painful procedures. It is your own personal journey through the space and time of modern medicine. Medical Grail is the story of Robert Bascom, a young, idealistic physician who had retreated to a small mountain top village in Italy to mourn the death of his young wife. While drinking wine in his small cottage he receives a call from the administrator of a small hospital in the middle of the Arizona desert. Corruption, incompetence and malpractice are rampant in his facility, he complains, and he pleads with Bascom to return to the US and help him correct the situation. Bascom agrees, and on his first night in town, while still suffering from jet-lag and a few too many drinks, gets an urgent call from a nurse and races to the hospital emergency room. Once in the ER he sees a physician in a white coat calmly and disinterestedly reading a newspaper at the nurses station. He turns and sees two patients in the empty ward: one is asleep on a stretcher in the corner of the room, the other, a man almost as white as the sheet covering him, is being worked on by a nurse and an EMT in a bloody uniform. He goes to the stretcher and while doing his best to save the man, asks the nurse, "Did you ask Dr. Perkins to help with this patient?" "Yes," she replies, "but he won't treat Mexicans." Medical Grail, a fictional story based upon true events, is the tale of a doctor who has traveled with patients who have made the trip, some successfully, others less so, through the maze of modern medicine. It will horrify you.